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Pigs land: A close look at Eric Holder’s announcement on Friday that he was ending the use of federal law to seize private property turns out to be greatly exaggerated.

Holder’s order applies only to “adoption,” which happens when a state or local agency seizes property on its own and then asks the Justice Department to pursue forfeiture under federal law. “Over the last six years,” the DOJ says in the press release announcing Holder’s new policy, “adoptions accounted for roughly three percent of the value of forfeitures in the Department of Justice Asset Forfeiture Program.” By comparison, the program’s reports to Congress indicate that “equitable sharing” payments to state and local agencies accounted for about 22 percent of total deposits during those six years. That means adoptions, which the DOJ says represented about 3 percent of deposits, accounted for less than 14 percent of equitable sharing. In other words, something like 86 percent of the loot that state and local law enforcement agencies receive through federal forfeitures will be unaffected by Holder’s new policy.

The story also notes how the press, especially the Washington Post which led with this story, teamed up with Holder to overstate the impact Holder’s order would have.

Holder’s action is still in the right direction. He just didn’t go very far, which makes perfect sense considering the generally corrupt and oppressive nature of the Justice Department since he took it over. Initially I thought pigs were flying by his announcement. Now I know they can’t.

10 comments

Obama and Holder, his agent, are in and have been in a concerted effort to create fear and instability in the middle class and false hope in the under class. This is pure Marxist / Alinsky strategy and that is what you will hear in the presidents speech (if you can stand listening to it. I can not)

That is what has been going on for the past 6 plus years, fear and false hope and in between him keeping everyone busy with that he is attempting to enshrine as many new government programs / entitlements as possible.

Funny you should mention instability in the middle class and false hope.

The word is that in last night’s State of the Union speech, Obama mentioned a plan to provide two years of free junior college (community college/whatever). I was once advised to ask questions such as, “at what cost.” The cost for this “free” college is a tax on 529 plans — the very thing that the middle class was counting on to help provide college educations to their children.

One can only wonder whether these guys think through their ideas to find the possible consequences. From what I have seen from the implementation of their programs, they just aren’t that smart. So much for the value of an education from a prestigious university.

Your question is a bit naive and implies that these people (politicians on both sides of the aisle) are un aware of the consequences of their actions. Your question implies a degree of innocence on their part. THEY (Obama in this case) KNOW EXACTLY WHO THEY ARE IN THE PROCESS OF SCREWING! (sorry for the caps but they are appropriate) And in the long run he screws everyone who believes in America and its Constitution.

This particular proposal of “free” community college is going nowhere, especially when the Republicans now fully control Congress. It is a conceptual political tool that is being crafted by the president and his people in order to draw the bright line between the “rich” (middle class / white) and the super elite rich and the under class (Obama supporters / differently colored Americans). Remember, Obama operates out of the Marxist / Alinski model of mass manipulation and must have one class of people clashing with another class, its classic.

This tool will be used in the coming 2016 presidential election in order to make any Republican appear to be heartless because they will deny “free” education to this particular under class / group of people. The Democrat overlords and “owners” of the minority vote will create the motivation for them to reject more common sense concepts and prevent them from thinking and possibly voting differently.

And that is what most everything that will be spewing forth from the presidents mouth in the coming months will be focused on doing. He and his party has nothing to loose and everything to gain.

The president is now free to say what ever he pleases.

And your welcome about the sarcasm alert, I know you have some difficulty weeding it out occasionally.

I agree that Obama intended to screw the public with Obamacare, Fast and Furious, and most (if not all) of his policies and programs. But they keep failing in ways that he couldn’t possibly want.

Obamacare may be such a hideous disaster that people have stopped trusting government to be the solution, thus single-payer healthcare may be more of a fantasy than when it crashed and burned as Hillarycare.

Fast and Furious killed so many people that it turned into a scandal instead of an excuse to disarm the US population.

Various other scandals have arisen, and Obama is only still president because the press is on his side and the Republicans are afraid of public opinion if they rescue the country from his incredible incompetence.

I agree that none of his proposals will make headway. He says one thing but does another, and has behaved like this from the first time that he had the Republicans over to the White House to compromise on the Stimulus Package, which he didn’t change at all after that meeting. He says that he wants to work with the Republicans in the same speech in which he proposes ideas that he knows they won’t consider (unless he is immensely stupid, he knows this — I am still hoping for Biden-level stupidity rather than “Manchurian Candidate”-level malice, but only because the latter is too horrid to contemplate).

As for the need for sarcasm alerts: I am an engineer. If I am not beat over the head, then it is too subtle of a nuance for me to weed the “signal” out of the “noise.” Beating me over the head does not always work, either.

It goes beyond just the traditional “screwing the public”, its about what he talked about from the beginning and one of the only things that he has been right up front about and is not a lie, only no one really allowed themselves to absorb it, and its “fundamental change”.

And “fundamental change” means to destroy the existing American paradigm (it may need some adjusting but not destroying) and install the American socialist model to replace it. How far he will get remains to be seen. And it remains to be seen where the opposition to this intends to drive us. The Republicans IMO have no particular political direction and are essentially driven ONLY by dollars, some half baked beliefs and no vision.

We have no “there” to be driven, there only “is” what is, we are stuck in political neutral. Where will our vision come from? Who will deliver it? Jeb Bush? Mitt Romney? Hillary Clinton? These are the family’s that have driven us to where we are at the present moment and the people must reject them and the people must find / transmit their vision into a next gen Constitutionally driven person who is unknown at the moment.

And that is our two headed “fundamental” problem, our country has no American ideal driven direction it only has the Marxist / Socialist / Liberal / Democrat party, and the Chamber of Commerce / military industrial complex / Bush family agenda driven party’s.

And don’t get me wrong, I love me some commerce and I love me some military industry, and I love me some bush, only the bush I love doesn’t know anything about wanting to be president so that it can keep driving the bus over the un Constitutional, sovereignty surrendering cliff!

I provide you all with a current events demonstration of how the Republicans have no proper American direction, who they are pandering to with this move is unknown to me. It certainly is not me, is it you?

Somehow, deep inside, I knew this was too good to be true. The trouble is most folks will support these types of illegal seizures because they think it’s only drug dealers who are being robbed.
As for the Republican party, their attacks on the Tea Party showed exactly who they care about, and it’s NOT the middle class, working people.
More of us need to join the Republican party on the local level and make changes from the bottom-up. I was part of a local group who did exactly that back in the early 90’s. Become a precinct committee member, attend every meeting and vote to support the Constitution & smaller government. The sacks of crap who are currently running the party will eventually need to give way to “our” candidates, whether they like it or not! This may take time but we can do it!

Fundamentally transforming the country necessarily moves us from freedom toward tyranny, since that is the only other destination, and that screws We the People. Obama has already successfully created a tyranny unlike any other in all of history, in that the US has declared that it may determine how We the People are to spend our own hard-earned money. There are numerous other tyrannical edicts in ObamaCare alone, and there are several other policies, passed or proposed, that further increase American tyranny.

This is not just a “my party is not in power” complaint. We truly have lost the right to choose. To choose whether to be insured. To choose our insurance coverage. To choose not to be affiliated with a health insurance company. To choose how to run our businesses. To choose how to practice our religions.

Government operations have changed from the process specified in the Constitution to decisions made by individual officials, both elected and unelected, and the needs and desires of We the People are no longer considered.

Neither the legislative branch nor the judicial branch have enforcement powers, which resides solely in the executive branch. Currently it is this last branch of the national government (formerly a federal government) that is acting on its own and ignoring the checks and balances of the other two. There is literally nothing to stop this administration from acting against the will of the Constitution, the other branches of government, or We the People. They have a lot of guns, and have just stocked up on ammunition. No one is stopping this administration from acting outside of the Constitution and no one is threatening to. Despite having been caught, the IRS is still harassing people for their political thought — so someone other than Lerner must be operating this tyrannical abuse of government power.

State-level officials likewise feel comfortable declaring dictatorial edicts, such as demanding transcripts of church sermons, and intimidating opposition. City-level officials feel free do decree what local companies may offer for sale (e.g. soda size) or give away as conveniences (e.g. grocery bags and placing salt on restaurant tables). This is not the free country that we had only six short years ago.

The Republican party is acting like the Democrats acted a mere five years ago, with their acceptance of ObamaCare and their support for “immigration reform” (although the laws of the 19th century were adequate, the laws of the 20th and 21st centuries allow for immigrants to live on welfare rather than be productive, and no proposed reform changes that but only allows for additional immigration of moochers). I have hope, but no confidence, that they are America’s savior — we have no other. They seem to be vying for the power over We the People that the Democrats have usurped.

As the cost of employing people increases (largely due to ObamaCare, but also due to other interfering policies, such as minimum wages), it becomes harder for people to work and be responsible for their own care and feeding.

Those of us who are productive are required to support more and more of us who are not productive. It would be in We the People’s self interest — more prosperity — if the government’s policies encouraged the unproductive to be productive — to create that prosperity — but that runs counter to the government’s self interest. When we let government run things, all we get is what the government wants, not what We the People want.

Government of the people, by the people, for the people has perished from the earth. I do not know how we are going to get it back, but if we do not do so soon, it could be decades, centuries, or millennia before it is again wrested from the tyrants.

I could go on, but you and I, Cotour, are in agreement. It is just that we are using different words and different imagery.

“Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America’s quest for the moon… Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America’s greatest human triumphs.”
–San Antonio Express-News